Take Action: National Security Bill Puts Land and Environment Protectors in Jeopardy

Join MiningWatch and the International Civil Liberties
Monitoring Group (ICLMG) to sign and share this online action to alert
Members of Parliament to problems with the Liberal government’sNational Security Act 2017, Bill C-59. Far beyond a
threat to the privacy of Canadians, it puts land and
environment protectors in danger of continuing to be targeted
as security threats.

Bill C-59 is the government’s response to the much-maligned
Bill C-51 that the Conservative government released to
nationwide protest in 2015. While we would still be in favour
of a full repeal of Bill C-51, Bill C-59 does not go far enough
to address the dangerous ways that it empowers Canadian spies
and intelligence sharing. Now that it has been sent back to
committee, there is an opportunity to raise our concerns once
again.

ICLMG has put together a
video to provide an introduction to this complex bill.

Indigenous-led social movements and environmental organizations
peacefully fighting unwanted and harmful mega-projects, such as
pipelines and hydroelectric dams, have already found themselves
targets of surveillance. Access to information requests
have revealed how such intelligence has been shared between
government and private sector actors through classified
briefings.

As members of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association
have laid out, Bill C-59 maintains the idea “that peaceful
resistance – such as opposition to pipeline projects or other
private development – constitutes a meaningful threat to
“critical infrastructure” [encouraging] the profiling of
Indigenous groups by Canada’s national security bodies.”

They explain that is much more than a privacy problem:

Pervasive surveillance creates a climate of insecurity,
with the potential to discourage legitimate democratic
participation, curtail peaceful assembly, and chill freedom
of speech, of religious expression and of the press. When
these consequences are disproportionately aimed at those
engaged with the democratic process through their activism
and political work, democracy, and the public interest as a
whole, suffer.